He wasn’t even that nice of a guy, I thought, not even a relative. Why had we kept up a relationship with him, let him be part of the family? With his rumored backstory, many details missing, at least to me, why he was embraced by my family was another mystery to be solved, right after the one about the dead guy at the wedding, the one no one seemed to care about in the least.
“Keep to the kitchen?” I asked.
Dad saw the storm brewing from my furrowed brow, the set of my jaw, and stood. “Now, Bel.”
I looked at Eugene, shaking Dad’s hand off of my arm. “And who are you really?” I asked. “You’re not a relative of ours. You have no family that I can discern, either now or when you lived here all those years ago, yet you came back for Caleigh’s wedding. Who are you besides some guy that hangs around our side of the family and got into some trouble with guns in Ireland?” I looked at my father. “Is that where you got all of those guns? Are you really going to make an installation with them? Or is that just a convenient cover?”
Dad blanched. I was completely out of control, not unlike how I was that night at The Monkey’s Paw when everything fell apart.
“He’s our friend, Belfast,” my father said. “Jack’s cousin. We grew up together.”
“You’re more loyal to him than you are to us,” I said. “Why is that?”
Behind me I heard Mom’s voice, soft but stern. “Bel. Stop.” When I turned, she was looking back and forth from my father to Eugene. “This is enough. We’re done with the lies.” My father wouldn’t meet her gaze, but Eugene stared at her. “You can tell her, Eugene, or I can, but either way, someone is going to tell the truth finally.”
My dad and Eugene seemed at a loss for words, so Mom continued. “Yes, he’s Trudie’s son and was raised by Uncle Dermot for a time, but he came to the wedding to confront his real father.”
I thought back to the wedding and all of the times I saw Declan and my father together. Right before the wedding, deep in conversation at the bar. During the wedding itself. How the thought crossed my mind more than once that Declan looked so much like Feeney and Derry, who, despite their dark hair, favored my dad in looks.
I looked at Dad. “Please don’t tell me he was our brother.”
CHAPTER Thirty-nine
Uncle Dermot, Dad’s brother, was never up to the task of being a husband and a father. At least not to Trudie and Declan, the two people he left in a small village in the north of Ireland to fend for themselves, Trudie with not much going for her beyond her great looks and fine figure, as Dad called it, and Declan trouble from the start. Dermot set out for parts unknown, a gay man in 1970s Ireland, and landed in London, where he lived out his days before dying of AIDS in the mid-eighties pretty much alone, his own parents having disowned him, my father being the only McGrath sibling to have kept in touch. Their last meeting, at a beautiful town house in Notting Hill, Uncle Dermot having made a name for himself as a shoe designer before passing, was when he revealed that he wasn’t Declan’s biological father.
But Eugene Garvey was. He just hadn’t known until now.
Trudie and Dermot had been best friends in that village, born on the same day and sharing more than just a birthday, including a love of Yeats, cooking, and drawing. Dermot drew shoes and Trudie sketched birds, and together these two best friends forged a friendship that would help hide the fact that Trudie was a pregnant nineteen-year-old with parents who would send her to live far away if they knew. Dermot and Trudie knew what happened to girls who got into trouble and it wasn’t pleasant. There were convents and orphanages and halfway houses, none of them places Trudie wanted to end up. Dermot, on the other hand, was attracting looks and gossip already as the only boy in town never to have kissed a girl, never mind dated her. Some said he was holding out for Trudie. His own mother thought he would become a priest, was saving himself for the Lord. He made the former the truth tellers when he proposed to Trudie one afternoon, her tears mixing with the torrential rain that fell outside the thatched cottage where she lived, Dermot cooking up the plan that would help both of them remain respectable members of their community while plotting their getaway from the repressive place.
Trudie told my father that the truth had come out just weeks before the wedding, Caleigh stupidly and unknowingly sending an invite to Trudie McGrath, seeing the address in her mother’s address book, thinking that any McGrath was welcome at her celebration. Whatever had happened, that invitation had sparked an outpouring of revelations from Trudie to her only son. He came, determined to get the truth from someone, anyone.
Little did he know that among this crowd being a keeper of secrets was almost a birthright.
“It was I who told Dermot to leave,” Dad said, the tears streaming down his ruddy cheeks. “I told him that he could help Trudie and Declan financially but that he only had one life to live. And he had to live a true life.”
“Is that why you fought?” I asked. The three of them looked at me, confused. “Aunt Helen said you had a terrible fight and Uncle Dermot ended up with a bloody nose.”
Dad chuckled. “No. That was over football. There was a little drink involved.” He choked back a sob. “I loved him, Bel. Dermot. He was a kind soul.”
Dermot had helped for as long as he could until medical bills forced him into bankruptcy. Dad picked up the slack, but for Trudie, raising a teen on her own, it was never enough and Declan fell into pursuits that he shouldn’t. Drugs. Alcohol. And worst of all, just a chip off the old block—allegedly, as the family said with regard to Uncle Eugene—guns.
“He came here looking for his father, looking for money, trying to blackmail me into helping him get guns out of the States and into the wrong hands in Ireland,” Dad said. Eugene had remained silent this whole time, his face a mask of sadness. “That’s why there were guns in the studio. He bought them, got them somewhere on the black market here. After he died, I filled them with cement so that no one could ever use them again.”
“And you?” I asked, looking at Uncle Eugene. “You had a child you never supported?”
“Bel,” my mother said, a warning in her tone.
“Would you want me for a father, Bel?” Eugene asked. “Don’t answer that. That’s what we call a rhetorical question.”
I stared at him blankly.
“I don’t want the answer to that one.” He took a slug of his Guinness. “And anyway, no one knew the truth. Until now.”
“You had no idea you had another son?” I asked.
“Just found out myself. And now it’s too late,” he said, and in his saying that I saw that there was pain there, the not knowing, the quick, murderous turn of events. “And before you can go there, I have an alibi for when he died,” he said, answering my next question before I even knew to ask it. “I was trying to calm down that big lummox your aunt Helen calls a boyfriend.”
I was pretty much done with this conversation, but that raised my hackles a bit. “Frank the Tank? He never says a word. What was his problem?”
“Something about Declan not being nice to Caleigh,” Eugene said, throwing up his hands. “I never could tell what he was talking about.” He looked at my father. “Not much of the orator, that one.”
“Yes, he’s a bit of a mumbler, not so much on the conversation. Mumbles Mouth McGee,” Dad said, taking the napkin off his plate and resuming eating, now that the cat was out of the bag and we were all on the same page. “Nice guy. Don’t get him started on 9/11. Thinks there was a conspiracy. That the government was involved.”
I tried to ask what “not being nice to Caleigh” meant, but the two of them were off on another tangent, fortunately not about José Ferrer or Arlene Francis, but meandering nonetheless.
“There was!” Eugene said, nodding. “And what about the Asian plane that went missing? You think we’ll ever see that again?”
I drifted away, Mom on my heels, while the men on the back porch discussed falling towers and missing planes and, of course, the IRA. Sinn Fein. The Trouble
s. Talk about not being so much on the conversation, as Dad put it. Those two were like a broken record.
I went into the kitchen, the place where all of this had started. Mom leaned against the counter and watched me as I started making a lasagna that I would put in the freezer for the coming Sunday’s dinner; it was Cargan’s favorite and something he had requested when I had first arrived home. As I put water on to boil, I looked at Mom. “So, do the police know all of this?”
“Of course they do, Bel. We keep some secrets from the family, but we’re not liars.” She seemed to think that there was some distinction, something that set her apart from other people with lesser morals. The secrets were doozies, but when you have secrets, keep a lot of them, it seemed that they all fell on the same neutral part of the moral spectrum after a while.
“I wish you had told me,” I said. “This whole situation has been making me crazy.”
My mother surprised me by giving me a hug, maybe the tenth or fifteenth I had gotten from her in my entire life. Her body felt as it did when I was small, taut and lean, with just enough cushion to make the hug feel good and comforting, and I let myself be loved by her without trying to pull away too soon or be stiff within her embrace. When we did finally separate, she straightened her spine and acted as if the hug had never happened, so I continued fixing the lasagna, laying out what I needed.
“And Mom, don’t worry about me anymore,” I said, thinking of the lentil crap in my fridge that I needed to throw out.
“I’m not worried about you, Belfast,” Mom said.
“You know what I mean,” I said, smelling the mozzarella to make sure it was fresh enough to use. “Going into the apartment. Cleaning. Leaving food.”
“I haven’t done that in days,” she said. She put her finger to her lips. “Maybe ten days ago? I left some lentils even though I know you don’t like them.”
“Really?” I said. Every day, there was evidence of her being in the apartment, a footprint here, a depression in the sofa there. A pillow moved. A glass in a different spot. “Ten days?”
“At least ten days,” she said, and there was no sign of her tell, the lip-licking tic to let me know that she was lying.
I put the cheese down and watched as she walked away, going through the door and into the office, and heard the sound the chair made when she sat in it. I thought about the story they had told me, my uncle Dermot, gay and trapped in Northern Ireland, Trudie pregnant and trapped in her own way. The “troubles” both national and of the Uncle Eugene variety. Of the yearbook on my bed, open to the page with me and Amy. Of hot dogs and how they smell, how when you make them the odor lingers on your clothes. Of peanut shells and how I found one behind the toilet in my bathroom.
Of Oogie Mitchell and the haunted look on his face that first night I had found myself in The Dugout, out of sorts and out of place, someone with nothing to hide and nothing to lose.
CHAPTER Forty
I thought about going to The Dugout, but I didn’t have to. I hadn’t seen Oogie in a few days, hadn’t been in to check on the menu. The times we spent together left me feeling a little hollow and sort of sad, so I had put some distance between me and my old hangout, and Amy’s father. I left the kitchen the next day to get a knife I knew I had, somewhere in the apartment, probably in one of the boxes I had yet to open after moving in.
Oogie Mitchell was standing in my bedroom, his hands on his hips, looking for something. He didn’t look startled when I entered, nor was he at all sorry that he was caught in my bedroom by me, somewhere he shouldn’t have been ever. “Bel, I keep feeling like I’ve lost something.”
I didn’t know how to feel. I wasn’t scared, but I wasn’t completely at ease, either. The look on his face told me that he had been drinking. That and the stench emanating from his thin body. “What did you lose, Oogie?” I asked, keeping my distance, standing in the doorway of the room.
He looked at me but didn’t respond. “I feel like what I lost might be in here. Or there might be a clue. Or that you know.”
I thought about the peanut shell behind the toilet and realized that all this time, when I thought it was Mom lurking around, it was Oogie. He had been in the apartment several times and left telltale signs of his presence. “I don’t know, Oogie. I’ve told you that all along. I wish I knew where Amy was, but I don’t.”
“She’s not dead, you know,” he said, angry. “They all say she’s dead, but she’s not.”
“Who says she’s dead?” I asked, backing into the hallway, trying to keep him talking long enough so that I could move toward the back door.
“Everyone!” he said. “And that damn candlelight ceremony. That’s what everyone thinks. That’s she’s dead. That’s why they come.”
“Why?”
“To mourn. To tell me how sorry they are that she’s gone and never coming back.” Without warning, he pulled out a gun from behind his back and shot at the ceiling. That’s how I knew it was loaded. Plasterboard rained down on his head, a huge chunk missing him by a few feet, landing on the pillows on my bed. “Is it up there?”
I put my hands over my ringing ears but could still hear him. “Is what up there?”
“What you know!” he said, as if expecting me to give him answers I didn’t have. “Everything! The clues!”
“There are no clues, Oogie,” I said, taking another step backward, trapped in the bedroom. It was tight and I had nowhere to go. “There are no clues,” I repeated in an attempt to get him to understand that I knew less than he did, that I had no idea where Amy had gone or why.
“You know more than you’re saying,” Oogie said. “You always have. You went away and took the truth with you.”
I held my hands up. “I know nothing, Oogie. I never have. I wish I knew something that could help you or anyone else who is looking for it find out the truth.”
“You went away. You took the truth with you.”
“I went to college, Oogie. And then I went on with my life.” The minute the words were out of my mouth, I realized how hurtful they sounded. Amy wouldn’t go on with her life because someone had taken it. I was sure of that.
He let the gun drop to his side. “Tell me everything. Tell it all.”
“There’s nothing to tell, Oogie. That last night, we had a fight. I’ll always regret it, but that was it, the last I saw of her.”
He considered that, chewed it over. “What did you fight about?”
To say it aloud, it sounded silly, trivial. And it was. But when you’re seventeen and the world revolves around a few people in a tiny town the magnitude is greater. “A boy.”
“Hanson?”
“Yes, Hanson,” I said, my cheeks flaming. What a hold he had had on me. Then it made sense. Now it was just embarrassing. I was taken over by sadness. Amy. My best friend. The closest person to a sister I had ever had, something I would never tell Caleigh, who thought we were closer than we were.
A shot rang out and I waited for the pain, but there was none. I had a feeling that someone else was in the room, maybe behind me, but I couldn’t be sure, waiting for blood to start running from my body in a steady river, ruining the rug that Dad had laid before I arrived home, the remnant with the hole in it. I lurched forward at the sound of the shot, if not the feeling, and thought about The Monkey’s Paw and Ben, the drought and Mom’s face at the bottom of the swimming pool, the mysterious bed and book in the basement.
It wasn’t like my life flashing before my eyes, more of an accounting of the last few weeks, an inventory really, and when I was done, in an instant, all went black, like someone had turned out the lights.
CHAPTER Forty-one
In my family, people never say, I love you, or anything approximating a nice sentiment. We don’t hug or kiss. We can’t have a truly playful time where everyone is laughing at once; someone is always mad even in the midst of hilarity, up in arms over some slight. We are a very sensitive bunch. But we do things to help one another and would have each other’s back
s if the chips were ever down, even though afterward we would each tease the other about being weak or needing help.
There was unmerciful teasing and sometimes fisticuffs, but I knew I could count on my brothers to be there for me, to pick up the pieces or bandage the wound, both seen and unseen, and make me whole again.
We would take a bullet for a brother, or sister, if need be, putting our own safety second. It was kind of like being in a special secret service of crazy sisters and brothers.
It’s not perfect, but it works for us. I just never expected that anyone would have to take an actual bullet for me.
When the dust settled and then cleared, I realized that I was on the floor of my bedroom, the acrid smell of something foreign all around me; I later learned it was gunpowder, buried in my nostrils. My face was pressed into the Berber pile, a great weight on my head and my body. In front of me, the light in his eyes dimmed, was Cargan, looking at me as if to say, A hand, please? even though we were both prone and side by side, in the same predicament. One arm was thrown behind him, the other stretched out in front, a gun in his hand, his fingers wrapped loosely around its handle.
“Car?” I said, trying to reach out to touch him, my arm immobile. It took me a few seconds to realize that there was a piece of the ceiling on top of me, heavy and unwieldy, making every movement difficult, if not impossible. I touched my brother’s face and felt a waxy coldness and that was all I needed to feel as brute strength overtook the weight of the plasterboard that covered my body. I flung off first one piece and then another, the piece that had hit me in the head rolling off to the side, and stood, taking in the carnage in the room, my breath coming out in short gulps.
Oogie Mitchell lay across my bed, his face in my down comforter, one arm dangling off the side, the gun having dropped to the floor when he could no longer hold on. Great chunks of the ceiling were strewn about the room, letting me know that more damage had taken place after I had been knocked out. I knelt beside my brother, not caring if Oogie was dead or alive, and took Cargan’s face in my hands.
Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Page 23